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Principle Unhappy Family Endeavor Deficiency Number Successful Ways

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What priciple describes an endeavor in which a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms it to failure?  Meaning, consequently, a successful endeavor (subject to this principle) is one where every possible deficiency has been avoided.


In statistics, this principle is used to describe significance tests: there are any number of ways in which a dataset may violate the null hypothesis and only one in which all the assumptions are satisfied.
Back The Anna Karenina principle



The name of the principle derives from Leo Tolstoy's book Anna Karenina, which begins:

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

In other words: in order to be happy, a family must be successful on each and every one of a range of criteria e.g: sexual attraction, money issues, parenting, religion, in-laws. Failure on only one of these counts leads to unhappiness. Thus there are more ways for a family to be unhappy than happy.

Tags: fallacies

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